Welcome to the 2012-2013 Pick'em! If you are rejoining us from last year, then you know the drill. For the rest of you, hi. Welcome to our annual football pool. All you do here is pick winners and losers, and guess at a couple of scores each week. Spreads are for suckers. Winners and losers, just like life. If you take first place for the season, you'll win something. What it is yet, I dunno. Lemme dig around my closet of old sports stuff. Last year's prize was a collection of Reggie Bush football cards.

Anyway, the league doesn't kick off until the first game of the regular season, so you have all of pre-season to truck on over to Yahoo Fantasy Sports and sign up. We're private group id # 661, and the password is v3. It's totally simple, free, and open to all. Join us in our annual ritual of sports prediction.

That is, of course, unless you're yella. And now, the fine print:

1. Prizes will be awarded to the single player with the highest accumulated points for the complete regular season + all post-season games after each player's two lowest scoring weeks have been dropped, as determined by Yahoo's scoring system.
2. In the event of a tie, and the tied players are located in Phoenix, players will meet and spit watermelon seeds in a single-out distance contest. If tied players are not all located in Phoenix, each player must submit a ~100-word essay detailing their first NFL experience. Essays will be judged by the league's commissioner. The commissioner's decision will be swift, just, and final. Should the commissioner himself be one of the tied parties he will withdraw from the competition so he can judge impartially.
3. If the winner is located in Phoenix, the prize will be hand-delivered by the commissioner. If the winner is outside of Phoenix, the prize will be mailed with alacrity at the league commissioner's expense.

No bold predictions. Maybe I come in first, second, or last.
Last year, I mirrored my picks in a #25 per year pool. Same thing, pickem but no two freebie weeks. I won two weeklies ($52 per) but lost in the year-end pickem prize. The winner got over $800 and I got under $400.
Did I mention that I love the NFL?

The grand prize for this year's Pick'Em is an unopened box of Jake's Flakes, a promotional charity breakfast cereal by forgettable wunderkind Jake 'the Snake' Plummer. If you're interested in more history of this timeless pre-sweetened artifact, there's a post on it here.

Like many other occupations, referees have something of a fellowship, a brotherhood amongs refs if you will. The scabs are, to some degree, sympathetic to the plight of the NFL referees and are actually doing a substandard job in order to help turn the tide of opinion to their brethren's side.

Normally, this would be a career-damaging move, but considering the circumstances - that they really haven't had much by way of formal training for the NFL - they can miss a few key calls here and there and beg inexperience plausibly... all the while making the pro refs missed that much more.

Congrats to Sunny for winning the 2012-2013 Pick'em! She won the box of Jake's Flakes handily, with an insurmountable lead going into the Super Bowl. Thanks for playing and hope to see you all next season!

From:Sunny will punch you in the nose for singing her name Date: 2/4/13 @ 07:46 PM

Thank you! I would now like to donate my box of Jake Flakes to next year's prize pool. The only thing I can't think of doing with them is eating them and something tells me they are as bad as Jake's career. Catch you all next year!

Congratulations Sunny.
Ah, put the box in a trophy case or something. Maybe you can sell them thar flakes at a collectibles show. Not that I am really into plushies, but I have a Captain Crunch doll, a Pee Wee Herman doll (talking, as is Chairy that he is sitting atop). And Timmy from South Park. All just sitting on a shelf and collecting dust.Like Jake is doing now.